Driftwood 3

While this may appear to be a skull prop from the next Alien movie, it’s actually a bit of driftwood I found on the shore of my favorite wildlife area. I imagine it’s the root of a tree blown out of the ground from the terrible wind storm we had here nearly two years ago.Water and weather have been working at it ever since and left it in a visually striking condition, though I fear this photograph doesn’t do it justice.

I would like to have taken this at a much tighter f-stop to get a bit more depth of field out of it, but I was in a very awkward place by the side of the river. I wasn’t able to use the tripod there, nor was I able to kneel or find any other posture that would give me a reasonable stable base to shoot from. I was sort of squatting and hunched at the same time, and I simply wasn’t able to hold the camera steady enough to risk anything slower than 1/250 shutter speed.